 All right, believe it or not my health was not always great. In fact for many years I was obese suffered from migraines every day and had such bad arthritis I had to wear braces on my knees to run and what's interesting at the same time. I was running 30 miles a week I went to the gym one hour every day and ate what I was taught was a healthy diet Very low fat high carbohydrate. I was doing everything right or so I thought it was until I began my research on the human microbiome that I realized I was doing it all wrong. So today I'm going to share some of the foods I used to eat and why they were contributing to my terrible health back in the day. All right number one low fat foods. The low fat diet was the biggest diet trend of the 80s and 90s. In fact the low fat food was dead wrong. The fact is eating fat doesn't make you fat. Now I too fell for this at one point. Why did this happen? Back in the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and so why did this happen? So they appointed the greatest nutritionist of the United States, a professor at the University of Minnesota, Ansel Keyes. Why did they choose him? Dr. Keyes was the inventor of the K ration which is what kept our troops alive during World War II. So who better than to figure out what befell President Eisenhower than Ansel Keyes K ration for Keyes. Ansel Keyes studied about 20 different people around the world countries around the world and he wanted to show that the more saturated fat that people ate then the more heart disease they developed and conversely the less saturated fat they ate the less heart disease they had. Now unfortunately out of those 20 countries he could only find seven that actually proved his point and he published a study called the seven countries study that really showed an impressive correlation between the amount of saturated fat the people ate and heart disease heart attacks. Now what's really interesting and I wrote about this in unlocking the keto code and the energy paradox is that there were a number of countries in Europe that met his criteria for instance post-war Italy but right next door France was not on the list as a really good country for avoiding heart disease and they had an incredibly high fat diet but because it didn't meet his criteria that didn't make it on to the list of countries he studied. So he was appointed as the advisor to what's called the McGovern Commission, George McGovern of presidential campaign fame to establish the national guidelines for Americans to eat. Now the Department of Agriculture was given the oversight of making the food pyramid. Now that's kind of like the fox guarding the henhouse. The Department of Agriculture's job is to get you and me to eat agricultural products and to foster the growing of agricultural products. So surprise surprise the food pyramid became heavily weighted towards grain products and other farm commodities and when the low fat part hit people rapidly found out in food producing companies that fat gave flavor to food and when you took the fat away the food lost all its flavor so you had to put in sugar to counteract that effect. So most low fat products became sugar bombs. Now I should add that during the time when Ansel Keys was going after fat the contrarian Dr. Judkin from England was saying no no no no no Dr. Keys has got this all wrong has nothing to do with fat it has to do with sugar and sugar is the culprit. Now in academic circles the two duped it out and Dr. Keys was let's just say a much better public speaker and a much better debater and he had the ear of the US government and Dr. Judkin did not and so the sugar as evil fell by the wayside helped by the American Sugar Council which gave generous grants to the Department of Nutrition at Harvard to show beyond a reasonable doubt that sugar had nothing to do with heart disease diabetes and when all this was uncovered by the New York Times a number of years ago we now know why Dr. Keys won and Dr. Judkin lost but that was the start of the end. Now our fats bad well there's great fats and there's bad fats and as I've written about in the energy paradox the worst fat is actually probably pulmitic acid palmitate. Among other things palmitate is directly converted into ceramide and if you've read the book there's a famous paper called death by ceramide and ceramide completely gums up the functioning of mitochondria it's death to mitochondria. So where does pulmitic acid come from? Well originally pulmitic acid was named for one of the fats in palm oil but surprise surprise the vast majority of pulmitic acid in humans is manufactured from our ingestion of sugar and fructose. In other words we make this very evil fat by eating the very thing that was supposed to make us healthy fructose and fructose and avoiding all the evil fats. No wonder I was a big fat mess. Now the other thing I did is I drank several bottles of carrot juice a day. The first thing I did when I went to the Loma Linda cafeteria was grab a big thing of fresh pressed carrot juice and drink it and I have another one at lunch time. Why carrot juice? Well it didn't have any fat in it and it was a great source of vitamin A and everybody knows how good vitamin A is for you. It had beta carotene. In fact I drank so much carrot juice that I had a kind of healthy orange glow to my skin and I didn't spray it on I drank it. Now juicing was and still is a craze and it's quite frankly a shame. Juicy means you're really just drinking the sugary part of a fruit or vegetable even if you're drinking green juice. Now remember natural sugars are still sugar and sugar is where not only calories hide but drinking pure sugar particularly fructose is mainlining the components that make palmitic acid and ceramides. Like I say give fruit the boot. You should reverse juice instead. What you're looking for in fruit and vegetables for that matter are the polyphenols and the fiber. The very things you're throwing away when you juice. So get out that juicer, get yourself organic fruits and vegetables, juice them, throw the juice away and take the pulp and put it into your organic yogurt. Put it into your smoothie. Freeze some and drop them in. You'll go a long way to improving your health and that's exactly what I do. Number three I was eating oatmeal, whole grain breads etc. Little did I know that number one these were lectin bombs but even if you don't believe me that they're lectin bombs these are glyphosate bombs. These are roundup bombs. Unfortunately all of our grains are sprayed with roundup. Even on GMO crops, conventional grains, oats, wheat, rye, barley, corn, a lot of our rice is sprayed with roundup. Roundup we could go on and on. Roundup is an antibiotic against the earth. Ninety percent of our agricultural crops, 90% of our corn and soy is sprayed with glyphosate and corn and soy are in a lot of our food products. Now we've been told by the FDA that roundup is safe because roundup targets the chikamate pathway that animals do not use to stay alive. Unfortunately plants do but unfortunately so do bacteria. So we now know that when you swallow glyphosate it kills off your microbiome. It's also a direct gut wall disruptor and one paper shows that glyphosate interferes with mitochondrial function. Meaning what? You gain weight, you feel low energy, you're more susceptible to disease and illness and the list goes on and on. And I can tell you as a heart surgeon when I was feeling low energy what did I do? I ate more because clearly I was low on food and I needed more energy and I see this over and over again in my patients. We also know that glyphosate kills off the bacteria that handle the tryptophan pathway that produces 5-HTP, that produces serotonin, that produces feel-good hormones and doesn't make you seek out food. Finally you are what you eat but you are what the thing you're eating ate. So glyphosate, tainted corn and soybeans and wheat is fed to our animals and glyphosate ends up in their tissues. So you're getting a double dose of glyphosate literally every time you eat. So what do I do instead? Well I certainly don't eat anything that might have been in touch with glyphosate. I limit animal protein. I only eat pastured poultry. I eat pastured or omega-3 eggs occasionally and I eat wild-caught seafood. You'll see in the new book Gut Check that I'm going to warn you away from even grass-fed and grass-finished beef, lamb and pork and you'll be startled why I am warning you about those foods as well. Please buy organic especially if you're buying mushrooms, berries, cruciferous vegetables, leafy greens, by lectin free flowers and grains like sorghum or millet. But buy organic. Unfortunately Roundup has leached into many of our regular fruits and vegetables. Number four bad mistake I made diet soda. Many people including me when I was overweight turned artificial sweeteners to quell their cravings without packing on the pounds or so I thought. Back then I would have happily performed heart surgery with a diet coke in my hand if I could have only found a way to sterilize it. Ironically all these products which are supposed to help with weight loss do exactly the opposite. That's because these products are filled with sucralose, saccharin, aspartame and other new or non-nutritive sweeteners which unfortunately kill your gut buddies change your gut buddies and allow bad bugs to flourish. These bad bugs are obesogenic in their nature. They actually make you seek out sugars and saturated fats but more importantly they're really good at extracting extra calories from the food you eat and passing them on to you. Exactly what you don't want to happen. Now sad but true you have no sugar receptors on your tongue. You have sweet receptors. Your brain when it tastes sweet assumes you've just eaten sugar. It's the only thing possible and it assumes you just ate fruit or honey. It sends a message to your pancreas to make insulin because sugar is on the way. When sugar doesn't arrive your blood sugar goes down. Your brain says wait a minute he just ate sugar whereas and he got cheated go back and get some more and what drives you to eat more when you have an artificial sweetened drink is your brain thinks that you should go get some more and that's exactly what happened to me. Now sadly even the real thing like fructose in fruit has been shown to be a mitochondrial poison and a poison to kidneys and unfortunately fructose is converted into uric acid. Uric acid is what causes gout. Uric acid causes insulin resistance. Uric acid causes kidney damage and uric acid causes high blood pressure. None of these do we want and all of these I had by eating a healthy low-fat diet. You can turn things around quickly and that's why I tell you what to beware and why I never eat what I used to eat. More amazing episodes just like this one watch now. The Mediterranean which has some of the longest living people in the world multiple areas in the Mediterranean use a liter of olive oil per week.